One great way to analyze an NHL team’s performance over an entire season is through visualizations.
Tables of numbers are fine, but they have a lot of limitations, especially when you’re trying to evaluate a sequence of events, for example a team’s performance game-by-game.
That’s the reason the first thing you want to see when you’re analyzing a stock is a chart showing the price change over time.
In this post I’m going to share what I call “Heartbeat Charts” for each team in the NHL, showing their game-by-game performance over the entire 2023–2024 season.
Reading a Heartbeat Chart
A Heartbeat Chart is pretty simple: it shows a big spike for a game win (which earns the team 2 points), a half-spike for a an overtime loss or shootout loss (which earns the team 1 point), and a flatline for a loss (which earns the team 0 points).
Here’s what these results looks like:
Below are the full-season heartbeat charts for each NHL team for the 2023–2024 regular season.
These charts are my first go at this form of vislualization, and I’ll improve them over time.
Ultimately what I’ll do is overlay the charts with interesting event information.
For example, if you see a sudden set of five win spikes in a row, was that because the team brought on a new coach?
If there’s a flatline section, what happened when it started, and what happened when it ended?
If you have any suggestions or feedback, please leave comments or email me at lenepp@gmail.com.
Anaheim Ducks
Arizona Coyotes
Boston Bruins
Buffalo Sabres
Calgary Flames
Carolina Hurricanes
Chicago Blackhawks
Colorado Avalanche
Columbus Blue Jackets
Dallas Stars
Detroit Red Wings
Edmonton Oilers
Florida Panthers
Los Angeles Kings
Minnesota Wild*
Montreal Canadiens
Nashville Predators
New Jersey Devils
New York Islanders
New York Rangers
Ottawa Senators
Philadelphia Flyers
Pittsburgh Penguins
San Jose Sharks
Seattle Kraken
St. Louis Blues
Tampa Bay Lightning
Toronto Maple Leafs
Vancouver Canucks
Vegas Golden Knights
Washington Capitals
Winnipeg Jets
Asterisks
There’s just one asterisk for this set of charts, for the Minnesota Wild.
My game results data for the Wild shows 88 points: 39 wins x 2 points = 78 points, plus 10 OT/SO x 1 point = 10 points.
However, the season standings I’ve looked at show the Wild with 87 points.
My game data source for the Wild is:
https://www.hockey-reference.com/teams/MIN/2024_games.html
The season standings can be found here:
https://www.hockey-reference.com/leagues/NHL_2024_standings.html
Data Sources
Getting this data was a bit of a journey.
Apparently showing game-by-game points results for teams — the most important data there is for regular season games, IMO — is just something most people aren’t interested in.
So, I got this season data:
…and used Excel to extract the game results:
Thank You!
Thanks for checking out this post! You can follow me on Twitter/X @lenepp.
